Colombian New Year’s Eve

It was a Christmas Eve repeat. Like a sequel to any mega blockbuster (Batman perhaps an exception), like your Matrix or Alien, always comes with high expectation and an equal dose of disappointment. Don’t get me wrong it was totally heartfelt warming to be with the family. I guess I might have enjoyed it more if I was fluent in Spanish?

We just sat around for 10 hours from 2pm – midnight. Yes, just like one of those Chinese new year days.. You just sit around, munch on some fatty chorizo, and wait.. After successfully killing 5 hours from watching a cheesy chick flick time-waster ‘He’s just not that into you’ (but for some reason the movie got all the famous people like Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Aniston! I couldn’t stop wondering why they had picked such a bad script) and reading non-important news (you know what new years news are like), I had to try to kill yet another 5 hours.. At 9.30 it was apparent that it was alright to start eating.. Dinner conversation went from King Qin in the movie Hero, to Bruce Lee, to how to roast almonds – courteous and safe conversations that are neither politically sensitive nor too personally touchy. I amused myself towards the end of the dinner with a Chinese tea making party of my own.. Eating the fruit cake that was baked one year ago was also interesting (you can’t really call me brave because I didn’t have the knowledge before I ate the cake.. Was told only after I finished the whole thing..! Was told, ‘It was fine because it was in the freezer!’)..

The highlight of the night was just overwhelmingly cool in comparison.. The tradition in Colombia asks superstitious people to run around the streets with their bags or luggage after 12am, and apparently these people would be able to go on many trips the next day.. So after 12am we saw a very diverse group of people running in the dark in the cold. There was a girl who was with her red cartoon backpack running with her black dog, perhaps a Newfoundland; a woman was dressed in complete running gear (even wearing a hairband!) dragging along a small suitcase; there were couples in fancy party clothes, but paired with trainers, running with their backpacks.. It’s such a funny scene because it’s dark and cold and it’s 12am and the last thing I would want to do is running around on the streets purposelessly with an empty suitcase..